ISR News Story

Alumnus Hamid Jafarkhani named 'Chancellor's Professor' at UC Irvine

Alumnus Hamid Jafarkhani (1997 EE Ph.D.) was recently honored with the title “Chancellor’s Professor” by the University of California, Irvine. The title is reserved for faculty members who have demonstrated unusual academic merit and whose continued promise for scholarly achievement is unusually high. At any given time, Chancellor’s Professors compose a maximum of 3 percent of the faculty of the university.

Jafarkhani's research interests are in communication theory with emphases on coding, wireless communications, and wireless networks. He and his colleagues invented "space-time block coding," a MIMO technology, that has become an active area of research and is widely used in practice. Currently, he is working on the challenges of designing communication systems and networks that use multiple antennas especially in the presence of interference. Also, he is looking at optimizing resources across different layers of a wireless network. This is in particular important for mobile ad-hoc networks and wireless sensor networks where the traditional layer hierarchies may not exist.